"Commentary from P.M. Carpenter"

November 27, 2016

I have a medical procedure scheduled for Monday morning whose sedation will, for the day's remainder, take me away from the circus. I trust I'll be back Tuesday morning. Take care.

***"You are a very sick man," said the gastroenterologist as I was arguing my way out of an emergency-room visit last night. I quote the good doctor only to show that I'm not being lazy in taking time off. I just need a bit more rest. More blood work and new, supposedly kickass meds today. I'll be back soon.

***

Update: I'm still trying to evade hospitalization by curling in a fetal position at home for free, rather than renting a $2,,000-a-day bed in which to do it. The success of my primitive efforts at evasion won't be known for a few days. I'd set the odds at about 50-50.

Meanwhile, this is a really fresh sort of populism playing out in the duck-lipped demagogue's cabinet appointments, isn't it? Let's see, how many billionaires and Wall Streeters are we up to to already? I would genuinely enjoy watching the white, charlatanism-blind working class get fucked by Trump's plutocratic establishmentarianism if it weren't the millions of thinking, decent Americans about to get fucked right along with them.

***

Update II: The odds are in flux; in fact I'm resetting them, via dismaying realism, at 65-35 in favor of eventual hospitalization. I have reset the odds because of a brief stretch at the e.r. yesterday afternoon intended (successfully) to raise my blood pressure — it seems my local clinic, which had recorded a draconian dip earlier in the morning, ratted me out to my gastroenterologist — and to restabilize some of my precious bodily fluids being so cruelly sapped by this, the most depressing era of American politics since Jacksonian Democracy (I shall live and die a Northern, Lincolnian Whig, notwithstanding my Missouri roots). Thus restabilized, why then, you ask, my resetting of higher hospitalization odds? Because my lower guts are idiopathically ulcerated: they're bleeding, failing to absorb water, nutrition as well — a dozen pounds lost in two weeks (hey it ain't all bad; I've been trying to rid myself of this unseemly middle-aged potbelly for two years). There are, however, two hopeful upsides to which I cling: idiopathic though chronic the ulcerations may be, the medications I'm now on may yet restore me to the more natural order of all things gastrointestinal before the hospitalization clock runs out; and an unrelated, further weakening, really nasty cough which had me heaving my upper guts upon every physical movement is now under narcotic control (which, further, has allowed me to sit up just long enough to rattle out this unforgivably rambling note, which, by way of excuse and self-defense, I blame on the writing bug, which is as incurable as the presidential bug).

I believe in transparency, and there you have it, as best I understand it. Many of you have generously donated to this site, and you are no longer receiving the product for which you paid. My apologies. Put in political terms, I feel as though I'm abandoning my base — and since I'm no Trumpian sociopath (there's that, at least), I also feel bad about that. The narcotics, as noted, seem to be boosting my energy level. So perhaps I can soon return to some work, which I miss and you deserve. For now, I'm doing what I can. More later, and take care. I love you guys.

I'm not a conspiracy theorist and I don't believe that election technology was hacked and I do believe that Jill Stein is an unkosher crackpot, but God bless her for annoying the hell out of Donald Trump with her whispers of conspiracy and election-technology hacking. All hail Ms. Stein for unnerving this pissant of a president-elect with her calls for recounts in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania.

The Clinton campaign has now joined Stein's efforts. "Now that a recount is underway, we believe we have an obligation to the more than 64 million Americans who cast ballots for Hillary Clinton to participate in ongoing proceedings to ensure that an accurate vote count will be reported," announced the campaign's general counsel in an online statement yesterday.

Notwithstanding their almost certain fruitlessness, both efforts are as they should be, since the pissant asked for them. For weeks he refused to say he would accept the election's results, unless he won. A loss, he insisted, would demonstrate a rigged system — and perversely, he was right. In their head-to-head November 8 matchup, Clinton defeated Trump roughly 51 percent to 49 percent; the real winner went down only because of an archaically rigged system.

We can be sure that had the loser actually lost, he'd be demanding recounts and filing lawsuits and whipping his primeval rabble to an obstinate and probably violent frenzy. Thank you, you knuckledragging horror of a slouching demagogue, for showing us how to accept defeat in the Age of Trump: We don't.

Even though we may not genuinely believe in conspiracy theories of electoral corruption and vote-hacking and all that, we are free to sling whatever outrageous accusations strike our fancy, for such is the pathogenic behavior that Trump introduced to American politics with a magnitude never before seen — the malevolent, mendacious little jackass.

Trump's tweet yesterday brimmed with projection: "The Green Party scam to fill up their coffers by asking for impossible recounts is now being joined by the badly defeated & demoralized Dems." One must be heavily saturated with bourbon and branch water to be at all insensitive to the bottomless farce of Trump accusing any others of scamming. As for his charge that Democrats are "defeated and demoralized," he was at least half right. Clinton was undefeated in the vote count, which, in any other civilized democracy, would have settled the election in her favor. But demoralized we are. What responsible citizen wouldn't be, what with a prehensile halfwit about to become commander in chief.

So bless you, Jill Stein, as well as the undefeated Clinton campaign. Bless you for needling Trump by turning Trumpism back on him. I trust this is only the beginning. Throughout the next four years he must be needled, annoyed, heckled, harassed and tormented with every Trumpian maneuver imaginable. For this is the Age of Trump — he defined it, he set the terms, and now he must live with them. Fair is fair.

November 26, 2016

And so ends nearly 60 years of very personal, bilateral miscalculations, although I tend to believe that in their genesis, the U.S. bore a bit more responsibility.

This is nonetheless a legitimate debate without end.

As George Herring notes in his splendid history of U.S. foreign relations, "There is no persuasive evidence that Castro entered Havana in January 1959 committed to a Marxist revolution." Indisputably, however, there were decades of U.S. domination over Cuban affairs (indeed statutory domination, for nearly 35 years, in the form of the Platt Amendment). And Castro was hellbent on ending it. The Wilsonian concept of national self-determination tended to go down easier in American power circles when others' determination comported with Washington's.

Castro's did not, as was soon apparent in his expropriation of American industries and cozying up to the Soviet Union for economic aid. Would the latter have come had the United States not imposed an embargo on Cuban sugar and, as Herring notes, "launched full-scale economic warfare" against Castro's regime? Had Washington been less paranoid in 1959 about the "Communist menace," would Castro have been less paranoid about Washington?

However balanced the paranoia might have been in 1959-1960, it suffered one helluva lopsided upheaval in 1961, courtesy the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations, whose mentality leading to militarism was so accurately described by Hollywood's Stanley Kubrick three years hence: "[We] can no longer sit back and allow Communist infiltration, Communist indoctrination, Communist subversion, and the international Communist conspiracy to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids."

On a personal note, my precious bodily fluids are already sapped — but with Castro's death, surely not because of the Communist conspiracy. I know not what virulent plague has visited me, but I must now return to bed; full of confidence, however, that with the glory of Trumpism upon us, I'll soon be shrieking in Strangelovian recovery, Mein Führer, I can walk!

November 25, 2016

Paul Krugman dismisses Bernie Sanders's call for a populist Democratic Party that could recapture the white working class by "stand[ing] up to Wall Street, to the insurance companies, to the drug companies, to the fossil fuel industry." Krugman explains why he dismisses Sanders's populist program, which you can read in full for yourself, but here's one telling instance: Take "Clay County, [Kentucky], which the Times declared a few years ago to be the hardest place in America to live…. Independent estimates say that the uninsured rate fell from 27 percent in 2013 to 10 percent in 2016. That’s the effect of the Affordable Care Act, which Mrs. Clinton promised to preserve and extend but Mr. Trump promised to kill. Mr. Trump received 87 percent of Clay County’s vote."

In brief, the white working class rather consistently puts a gun to its (as well as our) head. As an ethnic class, it's economically irrational. "Trump Turning to Ultrawealthy to Steer Economic Policy," screams an above-the-fold NYT headline this morning — an act as predictable any other Trumpian con. Trickle-down conservative elitism has been hustled as a poor man's populism for decades, with predictably ruinous effect. And the suckers took the bait again.

About this, Krugman is as befuddled as any:

The only way to make sense of what happened is to see the vote as an expression of, well, identity politics — some combination of white resentment at what voters see as favoritism toward nonwhites (even though it isn’t) and anger on the part of the less educated at liberal elites whom they imagine look down on them.

To be honest, I don’t fully understand this resentment. In particular, I don’t know why imagined liberal disdain inspires so much more anger than the very real disdain of conservatives who see the poverty of places like eastern Kentucky as a sign of the personal and moral inadequacy of their residents.

Financially, I'm not even up to white working-class status. Nonetheless, I'm sure my left-wing politics cast me, in the eyes of that class, as part of the infamous "liberal elite." I have this to say to them: You don't have to "imagine" that I look down on you. I do. There's nothing imaginary about my disdain for a voting bloc so spectacularly ignorant as to re-elevate a trickle-down conservative elitism that, in the hands of the most disgraceful demagogic buffoon ever, will cause yet more American wreckage. You deserve my disdain. You've earned it.

In Trumpism there reigns one untouchable political correctness: One should never question the virtue of the white working class. This class is superior to all others, it must be coddled, it must be endlessly praised, never criticized. It is the "real America." And yet, in return, the white working class is free to openly disdain all others.

To which I say, Horseshit. You can't doom America to four, grotesque years of Trumpism and then ask for my respect. What's about to befall us is on you — and you alone.

November 24, 2016

His eternal unflappability, E.J. Dionne, suggests several angles by which you "might coexist" on this 17th day of national mourning with your loud, ignorant, inebriated, Trump-supporting brother-in-law.

You can try reminding the subliterate brute that the presidential loser actually won "by something like 2.5 million popular votes, which in every other kind of election would just be called 'votes.'" You can agree that the Rust Belt has been "flattened by technological change," about which the winning loser won't do a damn thing. You can agree that "Democrats and liberals did not do a good job of addressing the estrangement of white working-class voters" — a "good job" being, presumably, that of blowing demagogic claptrap up their underemployed skirts.

You can empathize with the rabble-roused deplorables (tweeted one astute observer: "Not all Trump supporters are racist, but all of them decided that racism isn’t a deal-breaker") for wanting to "hurl a wrench into the gears of politics" by supporting a flagrant con man, whose wrench will of course hit them just as hard. You can "accept the criticism that the Clinton campaign didn’t devote enough attention to offering a clear economic vision," although the vision she did possess was never covered by the ape-obsessed media.

You can gently express concern that the president-elect intends to use his new office, "his power and influence," to self-deal and further "enrich" himself. And finally you can warn of Trump's unflinching proclivity "to punish his opponents and isolate a critical media," now through the "misuse [of] government’s power."

To which, I would add this. When all of your rationality fails to crack open a glimmer of self-awareness in the impenetrable skull of your loud, ignorant, inebriated, Trump-supporting brother-in-law, you can, and should, forthwith take the table's gravy bowl and dump its contents right over his thick head.

You will so enjoy the ride home, for you will indeed have had the happiest of Thanksgivings.

November 23, 2016

I'm still down, physically down (emotionally? — that's a given), and I haven't the energy to do much more than highlight a few of the disordered thoughts of America's imminent catastrophe, as captured in a NYT interview yesterday. ("I don’t care about anything having to do with anything having to do with anything other than the country," eloquently said the sexual predator who just effectively lost a $25 million fraud case, as well as the popular vote, who has defrauded the IRS, who has encouraged domestic violence, who wants to "bomb the shit" out of civilians overseas, who has insulted every minority and assorted others, and who won't release his tax returns.)

The revealed workings, as it were, of DJT's shambolic mind are even more horrifying than they were a year ago, before American democracy decided to take an extended break from prudence and rationality. The following presidential "thinking" is what the electorate's holiday from conscience has earned them. It's so absurd, no interjected comments are necessary.

TRUMP: As far as the, you know, potential conflict of interests, though, I mean I know that from the standpoint, the law is totally on my side, meaning, the president can’t have a conflict of interest. That’s been reported very widely. Despite that, I don’t want there to be a conflict of interest anyway. And the laws, the president can’t. And I understand why the president can’t have a conflict of interest now because everything a president does in some ways is like a conflict of interest…. [T]he president of the United States is allowed to have whatever conflicts he wants.

And there was this:

REPORTER: The Times [reported] in the past 24 hours about meeting with leaders of Brexit about wind farms …

TRUMP: About meeting with who?

REPORTER: Leaders of Brexit about wind farms that might interfere with the views of your golf course …

TRUMP: Was I involved with the wind farms recently? Or, not that I know of. I mean, I have a problem with wind …

REPORTER: But you brought it up in the meeting, didn’t you?

TRUMP: Which meeting? I don’t know. I might have.

REPORTER: With leaders of Brexit.

MANY VOICES: With Farage.

TRUMP: Oh, I see. I might have brought it up. But not having to do with me, just I mean, the wind is a very deceiving thing…. I don’t think they work at all without subsidy, and that bothers me, and they kill all the birds.

And this:

REPORTER: What do you make of the website [that Steve Bannon] ran, Breitbart?

TRUMP: The which?

REPORTER: Breitbart.

TRUMP: Well, Breitbart’s different. Breitbart cover things, I mean like The New York Times covers things.

And, this:

REPORTER: And on torture? Where are you — and waterboarding?

TRUMP: So, I met with General Mattis, who is a very respected guy. In fact, I met with a number of other generals, they say he’s the finest there is. He is being seriously, seriously considered for secretary of defense, which is — I think it’s time maybe, it’s time for a general…. I met with him at length and I asked him that question. I said, what do you think of waterboarding? He said — I was surprised — he said, "I’ve never found it to be useful." He said, "I’ve always found, give me a pack of cigarettes and a couple of beers and I do better with that than I do with torture." And I was very impressed by that answer. I was surprised, because he’s known as being like the toughest guy. And when he said that, I’m not saying it changed my [mind]. Look, we have people that are chopping off heads and drowning people in steel cages and we’re not allowed to waterboard. But I’ll tell you what, I was impressed by that answer. It certainly does not — it’s not going to make the kind of a difference that maybe a lot of people think. If it’s so important to the American people, I would go for it. I would be guided by that. But General Mattis found it to be very less important, much less important than I thought he would say.

***

Congratulations, America. Your singular achievement of 2016 has been to make James Buchanan look decisive, and George W. Bush look like a genius.

November 22, 2016

The accommodationism has begun, and I can boil it down to one historically based concept — one articulated by many a "good" German in the mid-1930s: "Look, we don't agree with Hitler's Jewish policy, but at least the man makes the trains run on time; and given the latter, we're willing to tolerate the former."

Also sprachDavid Brooks this morning. "It’s not my cup of tea, but I can see why some good people might be willing to tolerate Trump and Bannon’s personalities in order to pursue" a crackdown on "reigning dysfunction," a "concentration of hyper-macho belligerence," an embodiment of paleoconservative "nationalism," and, in general, that grandaddy of understatements, a "philosophic change of course."

Such is the thinking of the "the best imaginable Trump voter," writes Brooks. "This is the Trump supporter who wasn’t motivated by racism or bigotry. This is the one who cringed every time Donald Trump did something cruel, vulgar or misogynistic."

This, in other words, is the "good" Trump supporter who was and remains willing to tolerate racism, bigotry, cruelty, vulgarity, and misogyny — if only Trump will make the trains run on time, for the benefit of that (temporarily protected) voter. If other voters must suffer, if other segments of American society must endure Trumpism's racism and cruelty, so be it. At least the good Trump voter will get his or hers.

"This voter needed somebody to change the systems that are failing her," continues Brooks in a whirlwind of accommodating cluelessness. What "systems" would those be? The ones that spared us a great depression, that reined in the worst abuses of Wall Street, that saved the auto industry, that expanded healthcare, and for years advocated a vast infrastructure program which would employ millions of underemployed Americans?

The good Trump supporter saw none of this, but of his or her ignorance, we should be understanding, implies Brooks. Of Trump's manifest racism and cruelty? Pshaw. These are tolerable things to good, white working-class Americans. Who can blame them for merely wanting the trains to run on time — even if some of those trains will mow down the innocent?

It seems to me that Brooks's "best imaginable Trump supporter" is, in fact, the worst. He or she is the accommodationist; the soulless, weak-minded compromiser with pure evil. And congressional Democrats would be fools to act as accommodationists as well — to any degree.

It's a Faustian bargain to assist in making the trains run on time, when doing so must also tolerate Trump's racism, cruelty, and hypernationalistic madness. One cannot separate the two. That's been tried — and its inhuman, catastrophic outcome remains as a witness to accommodationism.

November 21, 2016

Let me put it this way: I have felt better.

This is another way of saying that my postings may be a bit scant for the next several days. I've been battling an underlying condition for the past couple months (more chin-stroking medical appointments are scheduled), which has now been blessed by another of God's gifts: an old-fashioned, garden-variety flu. Shortest version: I need some rest.

At least this week is a good time for being down, writing-wise, what with the Thanksgiving holiday upon us. Still, as long as I'm breathing tomorrow morning, no doubt I'll be back. I may have less to offer, but I'll have something. See you then, and take care.

"I want to be respectful of the office and give the president-elect an opportunity to put forward his platform and his arguments without somebody popping off in every instance, [but] as an American citizen who cares deeply about our country, if there are issues that have less to do with the specifics of some legislative proposal or battle but go to core questions about our values and our ideals, and if I think that it’s necessary or helpful for me to defend those ideals, then I’ll examine it when it comes."

Obama said of the new administration and Congress, "give them a hearing…. People should take a wait-and-see approach" on Trump.

[H]is advice about not waging all-out war on Trump and the Republicans isn’t what many in the shell-shocked party want to hear.

Not to worry, they won't be hearing it for long.

It is of course incumbent on the sitting president to speak, for now, in a conciliatory manner about the incoming catastrophe of his successor. But Obama knows, just as every conscientious citizen knows, that Trump & Friends' catastrophic incompetence, corruption and arrogance will be spectacularly manifest within 60 days. Obama can then say he's "give[n] them a hearing" — and proceed with blasting them.

Better Obama than no one — and no one, other than Obama, is who Democrats have to coherently speak for the party. They're all over the road.

This morning, Paul Krugman and E.J. Dionne don't go quite as far as I did Saturday — quoting myself: "everything legislatively designed by Trump and his fellow Republicans will be … some version of Trump University," hence Democrats, for their own protection, should uniformly oppose the administration — but they come close. The two columnists specifically warn against Trump's fraudulent infrastructure plan, as has Ron Klain, who oversaw the carrying out of President Obama's 2009 stimulus package.

As Klain put it in a recent Washington Post op-ed: "I’ve got a simple message for Democrats who are embracing President-elect Donald Trump’s infrastructure plan: Don’t do it. It’s a trap." For Democrats it's also political suicide — akin to a legitimate business believing it might cut a serviceable deal with the Gambino family. Mobsters love to make promises, but they never play fair. In the end, they'll gut you. And the modern Republican Party is nothing more than a crime family, with a new boss.

Krugman echoes my sentiment: "[R]emember that we’re dealing with a president-elect whose business career is one long trail of broken promises and outright scams…. [Y]ou should probably assume that [Trump's infrastructure plan is] a scam until proven otherwise." You'll wait a long time for any countervailing proof. As Krugman notes, Trump's plan in no way resembles traditional, government-financed projects, such as President Eisenhower's interstate highway system. Instead, the Don is "proposing … huge tax credits: billions of dollars in checks written to private companies that invest in approved projects, which they would end up owning"; "it ignores projects that are unprofitable" (many of which are the most needed); and "it privatizes some infrastructure needs," e.g., municipal water systems.

Krugman also echoes my more general sentiment; that is, that which applies to far more than Trump's infrastructure frauds: "Cronyism and self-dealing are going to be the central theme of this administration.... And people who value their own reputations should take care to avoid any kind of association with the scams ahead." In short, never play footsie with crime families.

Dionne's is another way of saying what's been said above. To cooperate with the Trump administration is to contaminate oneself — and betray the public. The next four years will be infused with blanket corruption and reliable con artistry; there is simply no way in which one can grow a beautiful rose from the Trumpian manure about to pile up. "All the roads in the world," observes Dionne, "won’t pave over [Trump's] transgressions." And we won't even get the roads.

Thus Democrats should oppose, oppose, oppose — making clear, all along, to the working and middle classes that Trump's roses come with plentiful, and deadly, thorns.

Trump’s plan is not really an infrastructure plan. It’s a tax-cut plan for utility-industry and construction-sector investors, and a massive corporate welfare plan for contractors. The Trump plan doesn’t directly fund new roads, bridges, water systems or airports.... Instead, Trump’s plan provides tax breaks to private-sector investors who back profitable construction projects.... Trump’s plan isn’t really a jobs plan, either.... Contractors have no obligation to hire new workers, or expand workers’ hours....

[B]ecause there is no proposed funding mechanism for Trump’s tax breaks, they will add to the deficit — perhaps as much as $137 billion. Yes, some economists think more deficit spending will boost growth. But you can be sure of this: In Trump’s hands, rising deficits will be weaponized to justify future cuts in health care, education and social programs....

[I]f the Republican approach to the Recovery Act is any indication, the Trump plan will come chock-full of policy changes that undermine core Democratic principles. Buried inside the plan will be provisions to weaken prevailing wage protections on construction projects, undermining unions and ultimately eroding workers’ earnings. Environmental rules are almost certain to be gutted in the name of accelerating projects.

Let's face it, everything legislatively designed by Trump and his fellow Republicans will be, by virtue of the designers' inbred racketeering, some version of Trump University. Democrats should unite early in staying the hell away -- from all of it. Oppose, oppose, oppose, because all of it will soon have that familiar Trump stench.

November 18, 2016

The Washington Post is running readers' responses to the question, What on earth possessed you to shed all rationality and vote for Donald J. Trump? The submissions are many, with one in particular summarizing the general sentiment expressed throughout: "He was an outsider," "he spoke truth about political correctness," and "he is not a Clinton." Most telling is the reader's final remark: "Why not be part of sending a message to Washington?"

The question itself is a summary of the reader's overall sentiment. Wanted: A rhetorical renegade and outsider ("not a Clinton"), both of which, by definition, would send a message to the Washington establishment. Inherent in the reader's message-sending was, of course, the reader's knowledge of what message was being sent. And from where, or rather whom, did this knowledge come? Naturally, incestuously, from Donald Trump himself.

Thus Trump would be the reader's conduit by which a message is sent, said message being Trump's message. His "message" was multifaceted and routinely incoherent; nonetheless there were some messages that were quite explicit. And one of them, notes Paul Krugman, was this:

During the campaign, Donald Trump often promised to be a different kind of Republican, one who would represent the interests of working-class voters who depend on major government programs. "I’m not going to cut Social Security like every other Republican and I’m not going to cut Medicare or Medicaid," he declared.

The message-sending reader is now learning, however, that Trump's "major government program" message appears to have been severely garbled in transmission, which is a gentler way of putting the naked truth: Trump was almost certainly lying his ass off. Continues Krugman:

The transition team’s point man on Social Security is a longtime advocate of privatization, and all indications are that the incoming administration is getting ready to kill Medicare, replacing it with vouchers that can be applied to the purchase of private insurance.

In Trump's defense, I should back up a bit. He wasn't really lying his ass off; as the perfect sociopath, he has no betray-able core. What sounded very good to his ralliers sounds doubleplusungood to the Republican establishment on which he now depends, so to hell with the cheering ralliers.

Most voters knew this was the @realDonaldTrump, and so they voted against him. They knew that Trump would only do that which benefited Trump, which, turns out, is that which will most screw his white working-class supporters -- to whom my only question now is, How long before you rally again, take to the streets, and be part of sending a message to Trump's Washington establishment?

November 17, 2016

In "There's No Such Thing as a Good Trump Voter," Slate's Jamelle Bouie calls foul on anti-Trump apologists for much of Trump's base, whose material "pain" and abuse at the hands of an indifferent establishment, we are told, provided the foundation from which the monstrous reality of Trumpism could succeed. Bouie cites, for example, the op-ed admonitions of progressive activist Michael Lerner, who wishes to shame all those who shame the supporters of Trump: "The left needs to stop ignoring people’s inner pain and fear. The racism, sexism and xenophobia used by Mr. Trump to advance his candidacy does not reveal an inherent malice in the majority of Americans."

That may be, observes Bouie. But they voted for malice, and that's for sure; that's the practical reality of their vote.

Millions of Americans are justifiably afraid of what they’ll face under a Trump administration. If any group demands our support and sympathy, it’s these people, not the Americans who backed Trump and his threat of state-sanctioned violence against Hispanic immigrants and Muslim Americans. All the solicitude, outrage, and moral telepathy being deployed in defense of Trump supporters -- who voted for a racist who promised racist outcomes -- is perverse, bordering on abhorrent....

[To] demand empathy for the people who made [racist demagoguery] a reality ... is to declare Trump’s victims less worthy of attention than his enablers. To insist Trump’s backers are good people is to treat their inner lives with more weight than the actual lives on the line under a Trump administration.

To Bouie's condemnation of Trump's voters, I would add another.

I recall, prior to the Republican-inflicted Great Recession, many white working- and middle-class voters discounting the real pain and suffering of America's poor. I recall the smugness inherent in their dismissals of American poverty, for the "so-called" impoverished, they sarcastically insisted, had their cable TV and malt liquor, their food stamps and rent subsidies, all their assorted coddlings by the federal government. To extend sympathy to "these people," said so many future Trump voters (and we know who they meant), would be a moral mistake. The poor weren't really poor; in fact they were living on easy street. The implication: Screw 'em.

Then came the Great Recession and its aftermath. And notwithstanding that so many white working- and middle-class Americans retained their cable TV as they went on food stamps, they screamed that sympathy for their plight was due them; it was justified. Their economic pain was real. Their suffering demanded America's attention.

Which I wouldn't dispute. But if they had had sympathy for others before, I would have more sympathy for them now.

November 15, 2016

Today I've hear more than one Democratic congressman say that Democrats are eager to work with Trump on a major infrastructure bill. Not one of them has emphasized that President Obama & congressional Dems have, for years, begged Republicans to pass a major infrastructure bill; that Democrats have been denied at every turn; that Republicans deliberately and maliciously deprived millions of Americans good-paying construction and construction-related jobs throughout; that Republicans now cynically talk as though a vigorous infrastructure program is a rather unique Trumpian idea, and some sort of previously nonexistent opportunity.

Jesus Christ. Is it any wonder that Democrats went down last week? They don't know how to play the goddamn game.

Beginning Wednesday I'm taking a commentary break, which will go into the weekend. I'm traveling to Southwest Missouri to visit my mother, who has recently succumbed to ill health. Today I'm getting my papers in order for the perilous border crossing into Trump Country; I wouldn't wish to fall afoul of my virtuous fellow Americans who have so recently taken their country back (which would be my mother's Native-American country, which those virtuous, immigrant white folk stole more than 200 years ago). If I've time and an Internet connection, I may tap out a few desperate messages from America's sclerotic heartland. So do check back on occasion. Otherwise, I shall see you in a few days. Take care.

So, what will [Steve Bannon do with his] power? He’ll target enemies. Bannon is one of the most vicious people in politics, which is why I’ve been joking for months that should Trump win, I’d be expecting my IRS audit any moment. That wasn’t completely a joke. He likes to destroy people.

Trump-Bannon's exponential Nixonian assault on the Fourth Estate is among the many imminent corruptions of what is commonly called The American Way. Like all thin-skinned despots, Trump has made no secret of his immeasurable disdain for any who criticize him, for he is an insecure child. And now His Orange Prepubescence will have as his closest adviser a vindictive, Himmleresque goon. When the Trump administration's IRS audits, character assassinations and assorted legal intimidations begin — and they will — those, I hope, will defiantly flood the front pages of the Fourth Estate.

Former W. word-slinger Michael Gerson, on "the long-term political crisis faced by the triumphant GOP":

Trump won the presidency in a manner that undermines the GOP’s electoral future. He demonstrated that the "coalition of the ascendant" — including minorities, millennials and the college-educated — is not yet ascendant. But in a nation where over half of children under 5 years old are racial or ethnic minorities, it eventually will be. Trump was elected by a 70 percent white electorate. But that was about two percentage points lower than in the 2012 election — and that number has been dropping by about two points each presidential election for decades. Trump’s white-turnout strategy is not the wave of the future; it is the last gasp of an old and disturbing electoral approach.

In 2020, after four years of Trumpian devastation, the gasp will transform into asphyxiation — a vomiting gag of shame and self-correction. Last week's election was the ugliest of freakish occurrences of voter insanity, combined with an oddball electoral system that ignores the actual, winning vote. Perhaps America had to hit rock bottom — indeed, the very rockiest of bottoms — before its citizens realized that the franchise is a sacred trust.

Of all the political mysteries swirling these days, the most mysterious has got to be that community of wise old men who tell us that we must wait to see who the "real Donald Trump" is.

I do not count President Obama among them, who is taking heat from the left for having been so gracious in his press conference yesterday. Obama's rhetorical forbearance was as it should have been; it is not the sitting president's job to further poison the incoming president's sewer. In fact I was rather surprised that Obama went as far as he did, commenting that "There are going to be certain elements of [Trump's] temperament that will not serve him well unless he recognizes them and corrects them." Only abject fools, who appear to constitute 47.3 percent of the American electorate, would fail to comprehend the president's muted observation that Donald J. Trump is a reckless imbecile.

Other wise old men, in both politics and the media, are however furiously engaged in a Trump Normalization Project. Give the man time, they say; let's see how he and his 17 months of naked obscenities shake out. Perhaps he'll rule as a sober, cautious, thoughtful chief executive. The enormity of his new job may temper his many-sided debaucheries.

Well, we've now had a week of the president-elect, and the real Donald Trump has proven himself the @realDonaldTrump. Irrelevant is whether his appointment of Steve Bannon survives the almost universal outrage it has met. The fact will remain: Trump was feckless and careless enough to announce a vicious misogynist and virtual neoNazi as his closest adviser.

Elsewhere, reports the Times, "People with knowledge of [Trump's hiring] process described a series of chaotic discussions." At the helm is a grossly incompetent executive who managed to screw inventors and countless employees as he somehow sank more than one gambling house, the only business on earth in which it is statistically impossible to lose. Such gross and, evidently, perpetual incompetence-cum-choas will soon be in charge of two million federal employees and the world's most powerful military machine. And the normalizing wise old men can't seem to see that the past is incontestable prologue.

Amidst all the "deliberative" chaos, can the factual horror of Steve Bannon be surpassed? Trump is trying this best. Under consideration for secretary of state is none other than that senile paranoid of malevolent gibberish, Rudy Giuliani. This dreadful little blatherskite could well be America's next ambassador to the world. If not Rudy, perhaps John Bolton, a jingoistic jackanapes who has never met a potential war he didn't like.

As the nation's chief law enforcement officer? Trump is pondering Sen. Jeff Sessions, an overt racist who couldn't even pass his preliminary examinations for a federal judgeship.

Thus the ineffable mystery of assorted wise old men who foolishly advise Americans to be patient. Who knows, they say, Trump as president may yet reverse a half-century of vast incompetence, rash misjudgments, pathological mendacity, Bernie Madoff con artistry and other miscellaneous demolitions of human decency. To such foolishness we can only say … For 17 months he showed us who he was, and now he's flagrantly showing us again. He is the @realDonaldTrump — a bottomless abomination of a small, pernicious, utterly clueless man.

November 14, 2016

At his press conference moments ago, President Obama delivered an extended tutorial to his successor, whose obliviousness to reigning realties seemed to almost bemuse the incumbent.

Obama cast aside virtually everything on which Trump had campaigned as utter, even ruinous, nonsense, from ending Obamacare to unraveling the Iran nuclear accord to disrupting the flow of international trade. On and on went Obama, explaining why none of what the demagogue had advocated (as far as it was coherent, that is) would work to America's benefit.

What was really striking about Obama's tutorial was that a reasonably well-informed middle schooler would have already known that which Obama has found himself having to both publicly and privately explain to a 70-year-old man.

Trump’s election is one of the greatest disasters in American history. It is worth recalling, however, that history is punctuated with disasters, yet the country is in a better place now than it was a half-­century ago, and a better place than a half-century before that, and so on. Despair is a counterproductive response. So is denial — an easy temptation in the wake of the inevitable postelection pleasantries and displays of respect needed to maintain the peaceful transfer of power. The proper response is steely resolve to wage the fight of our lives.

There is no rescue from the aphorism, that "History is just one damned thing after another." I don't know if that helps, but there you go.